Meshuggah are the only avant garde/experimental band I listen to.

Could Faith No More be considered avant garde/experimental too? If so I listen to them too.

Faith No More is more "nu-metal"

Mr. Bungle is "experimental", though

I got into fringe music through noise rock, oddly enough, albeit my first exposure to the idea of avant-garde music came with Mr. Bungle's s/t (which was one of my first albums). One day about 3 or 4 years ago I was looking up Terminal Cheesecake and Drunks With Guns and I happened upon this one blog where the owner waxed on about everything from noise to free jazz to tropicalia to modern composer and whatever else. His writing style really appealed to me, so I started to take a few recommendations, got hooked, and it basically snowballed from there...

I have difficulty pin-pointing exactly where I got 'into' really experimental music, but I think the gateway for me was Boris & Keiji Haino's 'Black: Implication Flooding'. I'd been into Boris for awhile, and then I heard that album, which lead me into seeking out more of Haino's work, which was really just a twisted spiral staircase of weird.

Though, I guess even earlier than that, now that I think about it, I got into Jandek. But I never really connected him to other artists like I did Haino.

Also somewhere along the lines someone recommended I listen to Navicon Torture Technologies. That created a monster, an event known in my life as 'The Noisening', in which I did nothing but listen to and download Merzbow, The Rita, CCCC, Crank Sturgeon, The Haters, et al, for about a year and a half.

My friends didn't like hanging out at my house much during that year and a half.

I dunno if this was a joke or not, but FNM =/= nu metal.
They were a gateway band for me.

they were at least the progenitors of nu-metal

they were the first to meld rap and metal and made it popular

There's always that arguement. Like people calling Iron Maiden power metal, or Venom black metal.
"Epic" is kinda nu-metalish, but that's about it. I just call them alternative or experimental.

Beefheart.

After "getting" him, everything was listenable.

Epic is a pop ballad...

Poster status:

Being tracked... will sadistically delete your random posts one by one while you pull your hair out wondering why you can't get to 15 posts...